Was 9/11 the catalyst for everything that's wrong with the world today

I wouldn't say "everything", but it certainly catalyzed the problem of balancing individual freedoms and privacy with the government's warrantless infringement on said freedoms in the name of "patriotism" and "protecting the country". Additionally, these issues have contributed to the increased partisanship of the two party system and made the people much more untrustworthy of the government as a whole. So no, I wouldn't say "everything", but definitely many things.

 

9/11 triggered the largest power grab by the US govt since the Great Depression. The 90s were still marked with interventionism, however no wars big enough to satisfy the appetite of our arms industry. Believe it or not, GWB ran on a campaign of non-interventionism and opposed Clinton's nation building.

We have certainly been in an Orwellian Bizarro world ever since.

Peace is War
Freedm is Slavery
Ignorance is strength

 

I think it depends where you lived in the 90's as to what happened. There were a number of terrorist attacks against US embassys in '98 and of course the people planning the attacks had been doing so for years presumably.

Quite a lot happened in europe and there was the Iraqi invasion of Kwuait and the first war against Saddam. China really started to become an economic powerhouse and who can forget the 1997 Asian financial crises.

Probably the worst event of the 90's in my opinion was the Labour party gaining power in the UK with Tony Blair using personality politics and smear tactics over policy. This was considered bad form at the time but Labour where desperate to win having not been in power in the last 18 years and as they have no morals they accused the Torys of sleeze.
They then went on to oversee the biggest internal fraud in Parliment's long history, thats what happens when people vote for a candidate who 'seems like a nice guy' rather than the bald ugly smuck with an economics degree who bores you to tears going on about what he'll change but could actually do a good job of running the country.

ps sorry for anti labour rant, i try not to but sometimes fail badly

 

...Hardly.

And it depends what you're talking about.

Like, if we're asking why Iraq is as it is today (and a lot of countries in the Middle East), we can attribute it to the horrible way in which the Ottoman Empire was divided.

If we're talking about why Israel is so fucking up, it's because of the exodus of Jews from Israel millenia ago.

If we're talking about why Nagarno-Barakh is so fucked up, it's because of bad division of boundaries during the Soviet era.

Asking 'is X responsible for Y' is difficult, because history goes back so far and every action is interrelated and part of it. But no, 9/11 was not the catalyst for all of the worlds problems.

 

There are much more recent events that lead to the instability of the region, like the Anglo-American thirst for oil and economic control over oil rich regions.

Don't see how borders are more responsible for the Iraq shithole than us propping up Saddam Hussein and giving him weapons after Iran didn't want our dictator anymore.

 

Okay
Well
Iraq really had no historical precedent and when they cut up the Empire to serve France and the UKs interests, they really didn't look forward to consider the feasibility of the state. There was no national identity, the population was divided heavily between the Sunnis (who enjoyed preferential treatment during the Empire) and Shiites (who, despite being the majority, held substantially less positions of power and could be considered oppressed), and divided between the Arab majority and the minority of Kurds in the north (who didn't even want to be part of the state, having been promised prior to the partition that they would be granted their own Kurdistan by the English). Despite this, they made an Iraq anyways and put a king into place that only served the interests of the English who put him there.

The only place where dissent was allowed to ferment was the Iraqi military, where the majority of the officers in power were, of course, Sunni. Thus it was from the military that opposition to the corrupt leader came, and from the military that the dictatorships that would continue to rule Iraq would come from. They continued fueling the sectarian and interethnic resentment through continued discrimination, but were able to keep conflict as down as possible through quickly meeting dissent with brute force. When the Brits were finally kicked out, and their oil industry nationalized, Iraq finally began to make progress, and it was seen as a model for Arab development for a while.

There is a saying. 'The Egyptians write it, the Lebanese publish it, and the Iraqis read it', reflecting this.

Development was still enjoying progress until Saddam came in and fucked it up with the Iran-Iraq War, putting the country through eight years of chaos and leading to the educated and middle class fleeing the country. The country was left in debt after this because other Arab nations gave it loans for the war effort (as Iraq told them that it had to face Iran, which was inciting rebellion in Shiite populations in Arab lands, and that Iran might seek to expand, so other Arab nations, which are always Sunni, of course supported him). In an effort to escape this, it invaded Kuwait, which we all know just led to further poverty (and thus radicalization, as poverty and war tends to do to a population). And so Iraq was, in poverty, until our friend Bush said that he had a little chat with God, and don't you know, he said to invade the country. And so it happened, and in the instability, Jihadis moved in to support the Sunni counterinsurgency, and also during this time we see sectarian violence at a level unprecendented in Iraq (which is still ongoing).

When the new Iraqi government was formed, a horrible thing happened. Since Iraq was authoritarian and banned all parties except for the Ba'athist Party, and since even today, Iraqis will first and foremost identify on either sectarian grounds (what Arabs tend to do) or ethnicity (usually Kurds), and there is no real national identity like most nations tend to have (though, slowly, this is changing), people simply began to associate with their ascriptive ties (sect/ethnicity), and this is how underground movements in Iraq pre-War and how parties post-Invasion were formed. Two of these parties, ISCI and Dawa, enjoyed support for having openly worked against the regime in the Baathist years, and they would be part of the Shiite coalition (that included Kurds) that won the seat of power in the Iraqi government today.

The problem is, these Shiite and Kurdish parties (rightfully so) are pissed about the years of oppression they had faced (especially Kurds, who were mowed down like grass, a la al-Anfal campaign), and this reflects in Iraqi politics today, and how the Iraqi consitution was to be formed. Again, the main drive for Kurds in Iraq is a separate state, but at the moment, this seems impossible, so when the constitution was being made up, they opted for a high amount of federalism. However, it works on more than one level. The majority of the oil in Iraq is in Shiite and Kurdish majority lands, and the Kurds pushed to keep all oil revenue inside the Kurdish Autonomous Region. After seeing this, and the relative stability in the Kurdish region, Shiites pushed for a similar status of Shiite majority land. Sunnis of course protested this, because it would keep Sunnis out of all oil proceeds. This, and ridiculous de-Ba'athification laws that pretty much means people who had no choice are being kept out of work for having been a member of the only political party allowed, has fueled sectarian and ethnic animosity, and violence. This is where Iraq pretty much is today.

Aaronman, the REAL issues of Iraq go back a long way, and they are mostly sectarian/ethnic in nature. Right now, Iraq has a whole lot more to fear from a very likely fullout civil war than it does from Ango-American oil interests (although English interests are the main reason for why all of this happened).

C'est la histoire d'Iraq =P.

EDIT: Oh, and you really need to understand, Iraq invaded Iran over MUCH more than the Shah. It was about territory (namely al-Shatt al-Arab), the fact that both nations had been funding opposition groups within each other for years, that Iran was a Shiite power that was actively speaking out to other Shiite populations across the Arab World (and this was a problem because Iraq, an anomaly, had a Shiite majority), and that Iran was now a theocratic and political Islamist state that was actively supporting Islamist groups across the Middle East and North Africa, which stood against the interests of nearly every Arab government which was for the most part more nationalist and whose number one enemies were their own Islamist groups within their own borders.

Or you can blame this all on American imperialism. Frankly, I think that doing that not only throws a century of Iraqi history out the window, but overlooks the fact that the deepest problems really have nothing to do with the United States at all, and is a foolish mistake that shows that you really don't have an understanding of Iraq.

Just to once more make this clear: it isn't just the borders, it is also about what is within the borders, which is what I'm trying to get across.

 

Very good, and very insightfull sopost. Thanks. Not able to rep you quite yet, must spread some love around first, so you get this post of appreciation instead

 

Haha, and what does spreading love entail?
Just curious.

 

Oh, just an expression for giving out rep to others before I can give to you again. Nothing more special than that

Since I could not rep you, I had to show my appreciation of your post in another way, more direct and more public. Which really is better than rep anyways

 

A lot of problems in today's world date back to Carter's presidency. Some of his decisions were disasterous, and the blowback has been playing itself out over 30 years.

 

Ahhh, then danke!

 

Shit was fucked up WAY before 8 1/2 years ago...

 

Simply, no. "everything wrong with the world today" is so incredibly broad. It's ridiculous man.

I mean, any major issue you can think of in the world today...poverty, starvation/"low food security", lack of access to clean water, war, disease, famine, genocide, slavery, etc.... all have been plaguing the world many, many fucking years before 9/11.

Kind of a dumb question to be honest...

I suppose it's easy to look back with some warm fuzzy nostalgia at the 90's but the world was all fucked up then, too. It's quite possible you just weren't paying attention. I mean, for the better part of that decade I was watchin' Transformers or Beast Wars, trying to figure out how to transform those damn toys. That shit is complicated.



tryin' to get that dude back into dinosaur form was taxing as fuck.

 

here's my 2 cents

9/11 didnt start a downward spiral for the planet, the planet has been fucked since the dawn of humanity. We are a Virus with shoes. The day that the last human dies is the day that nature will be able to go back to the way it should be.

BUT 9/11 did start a downward spiral for freedoms and the old way of life in the US. They can use that shit to do whatever they want. All they have to do is say TERRORIST and the dumbfuck americans will let them do whatever they want. They listen to your phone conversations, they track where you go, they see what you are doing on your computer. i am terribly afraid that america will soon be a police state with so few freedoms that you wont even be able to tell the president to suck a dick without feeling some kind of punishment

 

Thanks for the lesson, but I still think foreign intervention (which technically includes the partitioning of the old empire) and especially intervention in the last 50 years has created more instability in Iraq had they been left to their own devices. If Qasim, a mixed Sunni-Shia leader, and his constitution had remained in power wouldn't Iraq be better off today?

Both US-Iraqi wars have been fought with Saddam, someone we installed in the 60s. I don't see how that isn't as relevant, or more, as the clustering of multiple ethnicities into one border.

But seriously, I learned some.

 

i think what's wrong is that we can see 9/11 as a catalyst but not as a warning. terrorism is meant to spread an idea through fear and i think the idea they were tryna spread was that capitalism had become imperialism. i'm not saying i support what happened that day, a friend of mine lost his father that day and it was just atrocious but to have an empire rule the world and enslave almost the entire population is far worse and yet we fail to see any of this. so was 9/11 a catalyst? yes it was but only because we allowed it to be, which is a shame 'cause now all those people really did die in vain.

 

9/11 was merely the catalyst for the modern day terror scare. Every thing else bad in the world has been stewing in the shit pot since the end of WWII, and dinner's almost ready.

 

Saddam didn't rise to power because of the United States, he rose through ranks on his own (god knows how), and again, I REALLY think we are overestimating the role of the United States here. Iraq saw many coups after King Faisal, so I really wouldn't say that if it weren't for the US, there wouldn't have been another coup, because that didn't stop any of the others. It's not like America just swooped in and said 'Hey guys, here's the plan', and saying so is overstating America's involvement incredibly. The Baath party had been planning this for a long time prior.
There is this misconception that America can just wave it's magic wand and *poof*, the events fold out as it wishes. I can't stress this enough, it just isn't true. After the Brits were expelled, Iraq was primarily driven by Iraqis, so to say that Qasim could still stay in power...it's just not likely, there was too much resentment because of his authoritarian policies (which weren't anything new, but of course the other factions didn't like it when it applied to them). I mean, even if the Baathists couldn't succeed themselves, the other pan-Arabists in the region would have intervened. Arab nationalism was at it's height, and the rise of the Baathists was a sure thing no matter what.
Furthermore, I wouldn't call Qasim an intermediary between sects. Yes, his mother was a Shiite, but in Iraq that really doesn't mean anything (he was considered Sunni), and under him Shiites were still oppressed, as were Kurds.
Saddam is a huuuge problem, but again, we didn't install him. He rose on his own. I mean, even American intervention didn't mean much at all during the Iran-Iraq War (since he already had the support of most of the Arab World).
I mean, even if you look at Iraq now, the problem isn't so much America as what lies beneath. The Shiites and Kurds are economically choking Sunni regions on a level that is unimaginable. Innocent Sunnis are unemployed due to former Baathist ties. The country is very well on its way to civil war, and it's all because of Arab/Kurdish/Shiite/Sunni tensions and a very bad history.
It wasn't Americans that started the Basra riots that saw tens of thousands (mostly Shiite) killed. It wasn't Americans who supported the al-Anfal campaign that killed so many Kurds. It wasn't Americans that transformed Kirkuk. Iraq was a time bomb waiting to explode, and all of this was bound to happen sooner or later.

If we should attribute this to anyone, blame it on the UK. -___-

 

Not directly, but without us he wouldn't be in power.

Roger Morris writes in this 2003 NYT article:

Our support for the often brutal anti-communist fighters in the 60s and 70s has lead to a lot of blowback.